9 What to do with results of tests

Autoconf generates a configure script for the end user to run. configure is in charge of examining your system, and appears to do everything itself, but it actually runs another program, config.status, which does the actual outputting based on the results of configure. This output can be any of the following:

• Create (or instantiate) an output file by substitution; e.g., Makefile from Makefile.in. See Setting Output Variables.
• Create a header file, e.g. config.h from config.h.in. See Defining Symbols.
• Execute arbitrary commands. See Configuration Commands.
• Create a symbolic link. See Configuration Links.

configure additionally outputs a log file, config.log.

The flowchart below shows these steps. (Note that we omitted the config.status step before in System overview.)